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One line review: Worth a stop if it’s a short hop on your way to do other things in Santa Cruz.

The trip took 45 minutes around the SC Hills and through some criss-crossing roads after the entrance. The tour lasted 30-45 minutes around a wooden house up a slope that was worth the $5 we spent on ticket price. There were some pictures taken, a bumper sticker and a fun little day trip to SC. I’d suggest to anyone going there to plan out some other things to do in Santa Cruz because there’s definitely not enough content there to spend a full day on.

With that said, the tour was fun and definitely enjoyable as the tour guide tried her best to crack some well-timed and terribly lame (which made it better) humor to keep the audience interested during the lulls. We went up a steep slope and into a shack that was at the center of the magnetic powers of the area and then back down the slope. Past the made-for-children stories, there wasn’t much else to do other than take pictures with the oddity of surrounding area on your visual senses. Here’s some pics from the trip and with out cool bumper stickers (mine now resides on my work laptop…you know all appropriately and everything).

NOTE: The nightly build system has been changed a bit to work with datetimes in the filenames, so the following blog post is a re-hash with updates about how to get on our nightly build train.

Thanks to the complexity of a project like Mobile Firefox/Fennec where there are multiple releases across multiple devices that essentially have their own branch, confusion with versioning will occur at odd times (i.e. when your code is between a RC2 and RC3). That’s certainly a problem because my e-mail inbox gets filled with people who want to try the close-to-be-released piece of software. They become confused, ansy and/or angry about why they can’t install the right builds. So, I’m here to alleviate and educate a bit for those people. Here’s a big blog post about the two ways to get the latest Mobile Firefox/Fennec Nightly Builds for Maemo-based devices.

If you don’t have one, then please disregard this post and go on with your hopefully merry day.

– Automatic Update Installation –

1. Open the built-in browser
2. Download and add one of the repos in http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/repos/trunk_multi/ to your Application Manager.
3. In the Application Manager, Click on “Downloads” and wait for the Fennec entry to come up.
4. Install Fennec

This will load application catalog for the latest multi-locale trunk build of Mobile Firefox/Fennec and update your device daily with notifications (yellow-blinking sign next to your battery life indicator). If you would like to get a release that’s currently in development, you can also go back to http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/repos and click on VERSION_multi folder (i.e. 1.9.2_multi) and load the .install file in that folder at any time. If you do this, remember that you’ll stay on that branch and not be updated with the nightly builds of the next release that’s in development (i.e. 1.9.3).

– Manual Installation –

If automatic updates are not your style, you can also download and install .deb files of the latest nightly build as well. To do this, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Download the latest fennec .deb file from this link: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/latest-mobile-trunk/
2. Open the File Manager and go to the “Documents” folder
3. Open the downloaded .deb file with the App Manager
4. Install Fennec

Just like automatic updates, can you get the latest nightly build for the current release in development manually as well. Simply repeat steps 3-4 using the following link: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mobile-1.9.2/

For those that have used a version of Mobile Firefox/Fennec older than Mobile Firefox 1.0 Maemo RC1 and have not cleared their profiles since then, please clear it out and uninstall your current version of Mobile Firefox/Fennec. The following steps will guide you in order to do this:

– Clear Your Profile –

1. Open up “xterm” which will be in the “more” section of the application menu.
2. Enter in the command “cd ~/.mozilla/” (Note: To enter the “~” character, press the blue arrow that points to the top right with the Sym/Ctrl button to open the character map for the device. In there, select the “~” key and press the space bar)
3. Enter in “rm -r fennec” which will delete your profile folder.

– Uninstall –

1. Open “App Manager” which will be in the “more” section of the application menu.
2. Click “Uninstall”
3. Remove “Fennec”
4. Click on the title of the App Manager window, which will open a menu, and select Catalogs. If you have any catalogs with “Mozilla” in the title, click on them and click “Delete” to remove them.

I hope this was helpful!

Here was my mission this past Christmas to get some sweet vegan delicatessens to my family in Toronto a week before the day:

Goal:
Find a set of well-reviewed vegan delicatessens that can be shipped to an address in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Requirements:
1. Get it there on-time or before Christmas day
2. Try to keep costs under $100

What it took:
5 Bakeries contacted in/out of the United States; 3 Responses; 27 e-mails; 5 Calls; 1 Order; 2 weeks

What came out of it:
1 awesome Carrot Cake for $45.68 (after delivery).

Take-Away:
Uh, why isn’t this easier to do on the internet?

It’s been awhile since the last Fennec QA Update by Joel, so we felt that now was as good a time as any to provide another update. This is especially true as we’re getting closer to a final release with the Fennec 1.0 Beta 5 out the door now. Team MOQA has been really busy making Fennec the best mobile browser it can be over the past few months. With all the effort we’ve put in for quality execution on manual and automated testing, we knew the project was getting somewhere. But we had no idea how far until we started playing around with Bugzilla’s report charts tool. Here’s what we found:

Basically, we literally and figuratively went crazy in August and September with the number of bugs verified, but it opened up a whole bunch of usability issues in the project that started to bring the quality of the project around in October. The number of bugs fixed per week in the project before August was 7-8, but since August its gone up to 37-38. Now, this can be attributed to a whole bunch of things, but at the end of the day a person has to ask themselves if the overall quality of the project they’re working on has gotten better through their hard work. I think its safe to say that such a huge jump in bugs in a fixed state was attributed to developers having a larger number of bugs to work on that could be fixed…and that’s something we can hang our hats on.

With that said, we’re not done yet. Team MOQA has a couple more things up our sleeves that will really shore up some of the loose ends relating to quality and they’re coming hard and fast. So be ready for some hawtness with your Mozilla-powered mobile browsing in the near-future.

Things to Look For:
- WinMo Talos up and running soon
- Developing an extension to developer browser-chrome tests

Things Done:
- A robust system to move test and performance automation to any new platforms that crop up in the future (oh, and they will on the mobile front).
- xpcshell unit tests up and running
- We now have Release Test Tracking Pages for every release
- A String Guide (It’s a subgroup within the testrun) for localizers to find Fennec UI elements that correspond with the strings they localize in .dtd and .properties files within the mobile-browser source code.

Raw Stats (By Team MOQA since Joel Maher’s last Fennec QA Update on 6/30/09):
- 1092 bugs verified
- 276 bugs filed
- 64 Bugs filed in Testdays

Thanks to the generosity of my Director and Manager, Tim Riley and Tony Chung respectively, as well as Jack Aiello, my High School Computer Science Teacher, I was able to present at the high school I graduated from, Independence High School about Mozilla and what it can offer students who are interested in pursuing a career on the Internet. Mozilla means a whole bunch of things to a lot of different people; but to me, it’s an opportunity… and that’s something I wanted the kids at my alma mater to understand. It’s an opportunity for them to gain skills; a way to provide community service and to make the internet better all on their own time and at their own homes. Here was the presentation I created and used:

What I saw was that there’s definitely interest. Jack Aiello and his students wanted to get involved and about 10-12 students (out of the 130-150 or so students I spoke to) personally came up to me after the presentation(s) to ask for specific tasks they could do to get started. It was an odd thing to see because they had been given the same information that those who plop into our newsgroups and irc channels get (and that usually turns out well).

I talked to Jack Aiello about this afterwards and the thing we took away from it was that our system doesn’t have a way for kids to show their accomplishments in the community via a college application. One of the options he mentioned was offering a signed certificate saying the kids performed a certain task that was assigned to them (for a certain person in the community) would probably be enough. On top of that, these kids needed mentors to help show them the ropes in a specific task and Mozilla definitely doesn’t have a system like that set up, but we do have all the aspects necessary to make it happen. There are people all throughout the Mozilla Community who own tasks/areas/groups/etc. that are well-versed in what they do and are always looking for help. The only thing that we need is a list of people who have an assignable and simple task to complete whether they’re in class or out of class.

Jack went all the way to offer class time for these kids to get some real tasks completed if I was willing to get those two things for him…and I think that’s very possible.

Some other Interesting Take-Aways:

A lot of them didn’t know about a bunch of different features on Firefox 3.5, but all were agreement that the reason that about 60% of each class used Firefox over other web browsers is due to a lot of reasons we already hear (add-ons, faster, free, highly customizable) and a few ones that we don’t normally hear (lots of updates are a good thing because they feel Firefox is always trying to better itself and security updates are made very quickly and often).

There were three times that I saw a lot of heads nod in understanding what I was talking about:
- When I showed them that Mozilla is an opportunity
- When I searched Bugzilla for the bug and patch that added Private Browsing to Firefox
- When I showed them how to (step-by-step) contact our Mozilla Community (specifically newsgroups and irc channels)

There were a couple ‘wow’ and ‘cool’ moments as well:
- Showing Personas for Firefox
- Showing the NY Times Ad made for Firefox 1.0 and explaining the ‘static’ on the left page